THE RELATION OF SENSATION

AND THOUGHT.

It is very clearly stated in many books on psychology, Eastern and Western, that all thought is rooted in sensation, that until a large number of sensations have been accumulated there can be no thinking. “Mind, as we know it," says H. P. Blavatsky, “is resolvable into states of consciousness, of varying duration, intensity, complexity, &c., all, in the ultimate, resting on sensation."* Some writers have gone farther than this, declaring that not only are sensations the materials out of which thoughts are constructed, but that thoughts are produced by sensations, thus ignoring any Thinker, any Knower.

Others, at the opposite extreme, look on thought as the result of the activity of the Thinker, initiated from within instead of receiving its first impulse from without, sensations being materials on which he employs his own inherent specific capacity, but not a necessary condition of his activity.

Each of the two views, that thought is the pure product of sensations and that thought is the pure product of the Knower, contains truth, but the full truth lies between the two. While it is necessary

*Secret Doctrine, i. 31, note.

for the awakening of the Knower that sensations should play upon him from without, and while the first thought will be produced in consequence of impulses from sensation, and sensations will serve as its necessary antecedent; yet unless there were an inherent capacity for linking things together, unless the Self were knowledge in his own nature, sensations might be presented to him continually and never a thought would be produced. It is only half the truth that thoughts have their beginning in sensations; there must work on the sensations the power of organising them, and of establishing connecting links, relations between them, and also between them and the external world. The Thinker is the father, Sensation the mother, Thought the child.

If thoughts have their beginnings in sensations, and those sensations are caused by impacts from without, then it is most important that when the sensation arises, the nature and extent of that sensation shall be accurately observed. The first work of the Knower is to observe; if there were nothing to observe he would always remain asleep; but when an object is presented to him, when as the Self he is conscious of an impact, then as Knower he observes. On the accuracy of that observation depends the thought which he is to shape out of

many of these observations put together. If he observe inaccurately, if he establish a mistaken relation between the object that made the impact and himself who is observing the impact, then out of that error in his own work will grow a number of consequent errors that nothing can put right save going back to the very beginning.

Let us see now how sensation and perception work in a special case. Suppose I feel a touch on my hand, the touch causes, is answered by, a sensation; the recognition of the object which caused the sensation is a thought. When I feel a touch, I feel, and nothing more need be added as far as that pure sensation is concerned; but when from the feeling I pass to the object that caused the feeling, I perceive that object and the perception is a thought. This perception means that as Knower I recognise a relation between myself and that object, as having caused a certain sensation in my Self. This, however, is not all that happens. For I also experience other sensations, from colour, form, softness, warmth, texture; these are again passed on to me as Knower, and, aided by the memory of similar impressions formerly received, i.e., comparing past images with the image of the object touching the hand-I decide on the kind of object that has touched it.

In this perception of things that make us feel lies the beginning of thought; putting this into the ordinary metaphysical terms-the perception of a Not-Self as the cause of certain sensations in the Self is the beginning of cognition. Feeling alone, if such were possible, could not give consciousness of the Not-Self; there would be only the feeling of pleasure or pain in the Self, an inner consciousness of expansion or contraction. No higher evolution would be possible if a man could do nothing more than feel; only when he recognises objects as causes of pleasure or pain does his human education begin. In the establishing of a conscious relation between the Self and the NotSelf, the whole future evolution depends, and that evolution will largely consist in these relations becoming more and more numerous, more and more complicated, more and more accurate on the side of the Knower. The Knower begins his outer unfolding when the awakened consciousness, feeling pleasure or pain, turns its gaze on the external world and says: "That object gave me pleasure; that object gave me pain."

There must have been experienced a large number of sensations before the Self answers externally at all. Then came a dull, confused groping after the pleasure, due to a desire in the

willing Self to experience a repetition of the pleasure. And this is a good example of the fact mentioned before, that there is no such thing as pure feeling or pure thought; for "desire for the repetition of a pleasure" implies that the picture of the pleasure remains, however faintly, in the consciousness, and this is memory, and belongs to thought. For a long time the half-awakened Self drifts from one thing to another, striking against the Not-Self in haphazard fashion, without any direction being given to these movements by consciousness, experiencing pleasure and pain without any perception of the cause of either. Only when this has gone on for a long time is the perception above-mentioned possible, and the relation between the Knower and the Known begun.